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5. Printing and Bookselling in New England, 1638-1713 "Printing and Bookselling in New England, 1638-1713" draws on the three essays that precede it in this collection, incorporating their arguments and discoveries into a narrative that fits within the organization of The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, where it was originally printed, somewhat abridged, as chapter three. Revisiting the history of the first English-language press in North America, Amory trained his iconoclastic eye on every aspect of a story that had been told by Isaiah Thomas in A History of Printing in America (181 0) and, with more precision though not in every respect accurately, by George Parker Winship, Lawrence Starkey, and William Kellaway, among others. One task was accomplished with ease, demonstrating the relative insignificance of the Cambridge printers compared with the output of the printers who set up shop in Boston after 1675. A second was to clarify the sequence of printers and the presses on which they worked, a modestly triumphal piece of analysis. A third was to specify the relationship between church and commonwealth, on the one hand, and printers and booksellers on the other. Here, influenced by Sheila Lambert and Michael Treadwell's rethinking of "freedom of the press" in seventeenth-century England ,1 he noted a circumstance that is too readily overlooked, that printers and booksellers in the seventeenth century relied on state regulation to curtail competition within the trade. The sections dealing with censorship or state control are also marked by Amory's uneasiness with orthodox Puritanism. As in the essay on "A Bible and Other Books," he did not want to pursue Samuel Eliot Morison's suggestion that the colonists created a healthy secular (or humanist) culture, but he was also well aware (as that other essay demonstrates, citing Bibles that included the Book of Common Prayer) of the contradictions that emerged from any close study of the book trade. A few of his asides about Puritan culture are out of step with current scholarship, as I have indicated in two notes of my own. Nor do the details of his narrative sustain the assertion, for which there is warrant in some of the scholarly literature, that a pious, well-regulated press gave way to more "secular" forms of enterprise: the close connections between Increase and, especially, Cotton Mather and the leading printer in early eighteenth-century Boston belie such an argument. Where the voice in this essay becomes more distinctively his own is in Amory's analysis of two famous imprints, the Bay Psalm Book and the ministerpoet Michael Wigglesworth's Day of Doom (1662).2 The challenge in both instances was the same, to make sense of the quantities of copies printed and sold, quantities that, on the face of it, made little sense in the context of the near-inactivity of the Cambridge printers, the almost equally "unadventurous" Boston trade, and the very limited scope of the market. Extending a calculation begun in the essay on Michael Perry's inventory, Amory figured out the rate of sales of local imprints as compared with the rate of sales of books imported from overseas. These efforts, which included assembling a box of books matching in 106 Chapter 5 weight the English customs figures in order to estimate the scale of importations, led to a contrarian conclusion, that local books were "in print" for a long time, in part because they sold much more slowly than imported items. A telling example was the broadside edition of the Massachusetts capital laws issued in 1642 and, according to Amory, still in print in the mid-1670s when the selectmen of Watertown distributed copies of the broadside to each household. The production and distribution of law books, from the "Body of Liberties" of 1641 (produced in nineteen scribal copies, one for each town) to the 1648 Laws and Liberties and its sequels in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, served as perhaps the clearest evidence of the utilitarian constraints on the book trade. Other feats of analysis arose out of Amory's description of bookselling. The presence of certain names in imprints ("printed for" x or y) was, he argued, evidence of private patronage, not of bookselling as a commercial activity. sou Rc E: Chapter 3 of The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World (2000), reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press (New York), and including material eliminated from that version (ms., American Antiquarian Society). I. Freedoms and Licenses The colonizing of...

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